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A Prior

Working SessionCome and join me at the launch of the journal

A Prior #19: Olivia Plender

to coincide with an exhibition at Gasworks.

Wednesday, 25 November 2009
6.30 until 9pm 

Donlon Books
210 Cambridge Heath Road
London E2 9NQ

I contributed a text inspired by Bouvard and Pecuchet.

The issue has been edited by Anna Colin, Kim Einarsson, Olivia Plender and Els Roelandt. Other contributors include Agnus Cameron, Rudi Laermans, Dieter Roelstraete, Frank Maes, Marina Vishmidt, Robert Storr, Goldin & Senneby, Pablo Bronstein, Runo Lagomarsino, and others.

see you there!

[...] The great long wave of financialization, in which every need and desire is reconfigured as an asset to be securitized and competitively traded, only succeeded in submerging the world in a deluge of financial technologies.

Flaubert’s 19th century satire of Bouvard and Pecuchet, has returned as tragedy. Adrift in a world of our own-making, alienated by knowledge that returns to us as failure, we the financialized middle-class are indeed the new cognitive proletariat. And all the while, distributive markets endure, even flourish. Connecting peoples’ needs and desires through material things, via mediums of exchange, interlocked to form an ecology.

To imagine the world as a competitive market was to invite our own alienation from it.

Bouvard and Pecuchet

These are short extracts of a larger text comissioned by Anna Colin at Gasworks to accompany an exhibition of Olivia Plender. The full text will be online shortly, the publication was launched by A Prior

Intro

In Bouvard and Pécuchet, Gustave Fluabert distills the curse of the middle class into a deadly poison. Comfortable after a financial windfall, the two leisured bureaucrats, Bouvard and Pécuchet retire to the countryside to indulge their pleasure in knowledge. They buy, devour and study books on every subject that drifts through their attention. They read on agriculture, landscape gardening and food preservation, whereupon every animal they buy dies, crops wither, rot or burn, fruits waste and preserves are not. They read chemistry, anatomy, medicine, biology and think themselves doctors, whereupon they fail to treat or cure any patients, make themselves ill and estrange the local doctor. They read Romances, have romantic interests and quickly contract venereal disease. They study gymnastics, occultism, theology, philosophy and religion; they adopt an orphan to ‘improve’ who runs-away, they fall-out with the parish priest, argue with everyone around them, and finally contemplate suicide.

circulation

I wrote a short text, commissioned by katya Sander for Circulation, a special issue of Printed Projects.

I assembled some of the research I did around art auctions........

Markets are a brilliant bundle of technologies, assembled to circulate things. All kinds of things. The most visible form of market, is the competitive market. A neo-classical economic model of a competitive market, pictures rational individuals pursuing their own self-interest - without regard for others - as the motive force for markets. The laws of supply and demand at play amongst these rational individuals, extrudes the values - often represented by a financial price – exchanged, in any transaction. These fundamental elements; rational agents, supply and demand and price mechanisms function in all markets everywhere; like natural laws.

Except of course competitive markets don’t actually work like this. Or at least, only in ideological models.

Industrialtownfuturism

In 2006, as part of a group of artists, researchers and academics, I was invited to research and imagine the future centenary of two industrial towns. The project was curated by Jakub Szreder and Martin Kaltwaser.

Both towns evolved from the middle of the last century, and both were planned around the image and function of the factory. Since 1939 Wolfsburg has been the home and global headquarters of the Volkswagen Group, and since 1947 Nowa Huta developed around the formerly Lenin and now Sendzimira steelworks.

The Fordist-factory has dominated these towns.

Ice Trade

This is a short text that accompanied an exhibition at Chelsea Space in London, January 24th - March 3rd 2007

The ice trade, that is the trade in huge cubes of ice hewn from the frozen lakes of North America or Scandinavia and shipped to warmer climes, exists somewhere between brute fact and fairytale.

The trade existed, flourished even, throughout the later part of the 19th century. Grainy photographs depicting sawn meter square cubes of ice, cut from the frozen crusts of freshwater lakes are waiting, stored as documents in relevant archives. You can visit luxury loft apartments inserted into the hollow remnants of bunker-like Ice houses – warehouses for frozen water - found in many former ports of Britain, especially in Bristol, Liverpool, and London. There is also compulsive testimony from the American author, naturalist and philosopher Henry David Thoreau writing one of the foundational texts of the environmental movement, Walden (published in 1854). Thoreau records the cold winter of 46/7 when from the window of his forest cabin he sees the frozen skin of Walden pond being stripped by a hundred Irish labourers, and carted away.

‘[….] in a good day they could get out a thousand tons, which was the yield of about one acre.’

Beauty

NY_09

Man on a Plate

 

Winter sun. Just past the lunar equinox. Slack tides. I walk along the Thames path into town to buy On Grammatology by Jacques Derrida. Lost the previous copy.

In front of the old Billingsgate fish market I clamber down on to the foreshore. Combing through the pebblebricks, gravel, shells, bones, pieces of clay pipe, fossils, plastic detritus and ceramic bits-and-pieces.

Notice a distinctive drift of cobalt blue Willow Pattern shards. Squat, sift and see a fragment with an image. I pick-it-up to inspect. In China there's a man on a river foreshore. I'm in a Borges story.

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man on plateCamino 2009CarmenIntermediaeSanta SepulchroMum